Arizona: world, shut your mouth

It (the globalization of business) all gives credence to a bill in the Arizona Legislature to create international schools to help make students globally competitive….

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Mark Anderson, R-Mesa, would have put three K-12 schools in the northern, central and southern parts of the state, where kids would begin a second language in kindergarten, and set up new international programs at seven high schools. Big business and universities pledged to partner with the schools. First-year costs would have been $2.3 million, or less than 0.02 percent of the proposed state budget.

Wisconsin, Kansas and Ohio have launched similar programs.

The bill took some twists and turns:

Some Arizona legislators were so opposed to the bill that supporters changed the name from international schools to American competitiveness project schools to appease them.

That didn’t sway Sen. Ron Gould, a Lake Havasu City Republican.

“What I’m assuming is that they changed the name, trying to get us to be less objectionable, as if, you know, a rose by any other name is not as sweet,” said Gould, a member of the Senate’s K-12 Education Committee. “There’s a lot of us here who are not internationalists. These schools actually have kind of a United Nations flavor to them, and we’re actually into educating Americans into Americanism, not internationalism.”

Sen. Karen Johnson, a Mesa Republican and chairwoman of the K-12 Education Committee, never let the proposal out of committee. Johnson instead brought in a professor from Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minn., to educate lawmakers on the dangers of a popular international studies program, the International Baccalaureate. The 37-year-old high school program offers rigorous courses and diploma programs in schools worldwide, including 759 in the United States and 12 in Arizona. Its goals are intercultural understanding, community service and preparation for university work.

“The International Baccalaureate is un-American,” Allen Quist, who served in the Minnesota Legislature in the 1980s and ran for Minnesota governor as a Republican in 1994, said in a phone interview. He said that International Baccalaureate’s links to the United Nations are disturbing and that its sense of right and wrong is ambiguous.

It teaches students to see the American system of government as one of many, not as the only one that protects universal and God-given rights to property, to bear arms and free speech, Quist said.

Imagine the horrors of students learning about the rest of the world and being fluent in foreign languages. Why, they might wind up being highly employable! They might even start successful businesses based on international trade right there in Arizona, raising the specter of jobs and money in the state!

There’s not much to judge the merits of this particular program in the article; it may be that this was a good idea that would have been badly implemented. But that’s not the complaint that led to the bill’s defeat: it’s that it would put crazy international ideas into the heads of Arizona’s students.

Sen. Gould’s comments are particularly weird. What is this “Americanism” he’s talking about? An ideology of not working with companies in other countries? Not learning widely-spoken languages that make it easier to do business around the world? Is this “Americanism” actually good for the US? I doubt it.

While Arizona’s legislature is certainly within its rights to decide that it wants the state to be less competitive in the world of global business, one has to wonder if that’s really what Arizonans want. But then, those with a view beyond the state line can always just leave the state, taking their skills and money with them.